Most companies want either the rock-solid protection of a data center, or the versatile,
on-demand flexibility promised by the cloud. But can you have both? There are ways to
hedge your bets, of course, by adopting a hybrid IT approach – keeping a data center
footprint for mission-critical workloads, and shifting other resources to the cloud. How-
ever, this approach does not really blend protection and flexibility; it simply offers pro-
tection in one place, and flexibility in another.
So, is there a medium that attempts to deliver both benefits in one location? We would
argue that there is. We are seeing the emergence of a new concept many of us here at
Cloud Technology Partners (CTP) call the “On-Demand Data Center.”
The term has not caught on in a big way – yet. If you Google “On-Demand Data Center,”
you will come across five-year-old posts about making physical data centers more agile
and current posts about software relating to colocation facilities.
What we see is different. On a project-by-project basis, forward-looking companies are
letting software development teams leverage the public cloud to stand up data cen-
ter-like resources quickly, inexpensively and only when they are needed – on demand.
The teams run these dedicated On-Demand Data Centers for a while, and when they
decide they do not need them anymore, they delete their virtual facilities at the end of
the day.
This gives companies two of the most important IT benefits they are looking for. Devel-
opers get the ability to embark on projects without friction and central IT teams can take
advantage of automation, providing all the governance and controls the development
team needs to keep itself – and the company – safe.
Early Adopter Stage
The process is still in the early adopter stage. Many company leaders we talk to are hes-
itant to greenlight On-Demand Data Center initiatives because they still have lots of
open questions. But a few years from now, this approach should be much more
common.
Here is how On-Demand Data Centers work. After committing to one of the major public
cloud vendors – AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform – companies give
teams the ability to create their own individual data centers in the vendor’s cloud. Using
software-defined infrastructure services provided by the cloud vendor, each team
stands up a highly available, redundant, fully operational data center in any region where
the cloud vendor has a dedicated center.
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